The present invention relates in general to telephone conferencing techniques, and in particular, to a new and useful teleconferencing system which is capable of partitioning the ports of a bridge among a plurality of customers, which includes improved network management for administrating and utilizing the system, and video conferencing capability.
In the field of telephone communications, a bridge is a micro-processor controlled device which has a multiplicity of ports that can be interconnected in a variety of ways for connecting multiple telephone lines to each other. Bridges are often used to establish multi-party conference calls. An enhanced dedicated teleconferencing system which is capable of establishing and controlling conference calls through a bridge is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,796,293 which is owned by the assignee of the present application and which is incorporated here by reference. This patent discloses a method and apparatus for teleconferencing which utilizes a service computer to advantageously manipulate and control the microprocessor in the bridge.
As the demand for conference call services increases, improvements are needed in the flexibility, responsiveness and data carrying capability of the service.
A bridge may include any number of ports, e.g. 240 ports, which can service as many calls. Many customers who may utilize telephone conferencing services may never have a need for all of the bridge's ports however. A need exists for a mechanism and technique which can utilize a single bridge with multiple ports to service more than one customer, with each customer using only some of the ports of the bridge.
Improvements are also needed in network management for telephone conferencing services to reduce the demands placed on customers during the setup and operation of a conference.
The ability to transmit not only voice communication but also data is also important. The above-identified U.S. Pat. No. 4,796,293 can accommodate data transfer through personal computers which are used in conjunction with telephones during a conference call. Recently, with the advent of video data transmission over regular telephone lines, even greater data transferring capacity is required. This problem is compounded in the environment of a conference call where multiple participants must be serviced.